How a Doctor Healed Himself by Becoming a Novelist

Ron Wilk loved being a neurologist and spent 23 satisfying years practicing what he saw as his life's calling. Then, in 2000, the Boca Raton physician's life was inexorably altered by a slip and fall down a stairwell. The accident left Wilk with a permanently injured spine, headaches and frequently excruciating pain in his back and neck.

"My specialty required a lot of bending and lifting to examine patients," he says."I couldn't do it anymore." He couldn't even stand or sit for more than a few hours without having to lie down. At age 55, he had no choice but to retire from medicine. He also had to give up tennis and boating, the hobbies that he enjoyed. Long divorced and childless, he didn't have a family to for emotional support. He didn't know what to do with himself.

Wilk felt devastatingly depressed until he finally he decided that he had to make a change. "I had to accept what had happened," he says. "This was my life now. I had to find something else to do with myself."

From his experience as a neurologist, Wilk knew that continual intellectual stimulation was a big help in keeping patients' minds sharp and their spirits resilient. So he set out to find that sort of challenge for himself. Wilk briefly tried law school, but the long stretches of sitting motionless in the classroom were too much. Writing legal briefs and papers, however, did give him an epiphany. "I found that I really enjoyed writing, putting words on a page," he recalls.

He'd been a casual reader of mystery thrillers of the Tom Clancy-Robert Ludlum genre for years. Why not try to write a thriller himself?

So Wilk set out to transform himself into a writer. He took the usual classes, joined writers groups, read a few how-to books. But mostly, he just repurposed the acumen he'd honed through years of methodically examining patients and figuring out their problems. "Neurology is incredibly detail-oriented," he explains. "You have to take in everything and pay attention to it all." Instead of plotting and following an intricate outline, as many novelists do, he was able to conjure up detailed characters and then envision their scenes in his head as he wrote. To cope with his back and neck problems, he alternated between bursts of writing at his computer and lying down for short breaks (a regimen inadvertently similar to that of Laura Hillenbrand, author of the 2001 bestseller Seabiscuit: An American Legend, who suffers from severe chronic fatigue syndrome).

By 2002, two years after his catastrophic injury, he'd completed a thriller, Red Death, about a dashing lothario doctor who escapes from various hair-raising scrapes.

Wilk had managed to overcome severe physical pain and the difficulty of learning a completely new skill, only to encounter yet another daunting obstacle: the difficulty of getting the hidebound, insider-ish publishing industry to take a chance on a new author. He managed to find a New York literary agent to represent him, but she wasn't able to make a sale. Many fledgling novelists would have packed it in at that point, but Wilk wasn't quite ready to give up. "I didn't know whether or not readers would like what I'd written," he says. "I wanted to find out."

It was a predicament that countless other beginning novelists have experienced. Mega-bestselling novelist John Grisham endured having his first book, A Time to Kill, rejected by 28 publishers, until he finally found a small house willing to publish a run of 5,000 copies. He then went to bookstores and pleaded with them to stock it.

But Wilk had another idea. "The web is the greatest marketing tool ever invented," he says. To get attention, he created a website with a catchy URL, freefictiononline.com, and then stocked it with hundreds of links to e-books that various unpublished authors were willing to give away, in addition to free games and online avatars. Of course, the site also prominently showcased Red Death and eventually his second effort, the cyber-thriller Kerberos. It worked. Slowly but surely, Wilk developed an online following, and after three years, nearly one million readers downloaded his two free novels in Adobe Acrobat format. That gave Wilk enough cache that he was able to sell his third novel, Papal Rogues, to Minneapolis-based Langdon Street Press, an imprint of Hillcrest Publishing, which released the book in April. Papal Rogues is now available as a trade paperback and an Amazon Kindle edition. He's now working on a fourth novel.

Wilk is proof that perseverance can pay off--if it's coupled with the willingness to envision a new goal for yourself and the intellectual flexibility to plot an individualized route to accomplishing it. "When I think back on on my life, I think there always was a writer inside of me, waiting to come out," he says. But no matter, because he's made himself into one.